And Now Grenade Walking — DOJ Body Count Grows
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Posted 10/18/2013 05:38 PM ET
For Kingery, grenades were "novelty items." AP View Enlarged Image
The same Obama administration officials responsible for letting thousands of weapons walk into Mexico and right into the hands of drug cartels in Operation Fast and Furious also passed on several opportunities to arrest and prosecute an arms smuggler who was busy supplying the cartels with hand grenades.
This according to a report by Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News, the one reporter who has taken the time to expose the deadliest of the administration's "phony" scandals.
Attkisson, whose yeoman work exposed much of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' Fast and Furious operation, acquired a Justice Department "Significant Incident Report" filed last Tuesday. It details a deadly drug-cartel shootout with Mexican police in Guadalajara last week that killed three policemen and four cartel members and in which at least 10 hand grenades were used.
Grenades have been a weapon of choice for the Mexican cartels. A cartel attack on Aug. 25, 2011, in a Monterrey casino killed 53 people. One of those used in last week's battle with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel has been linked to Jean Baptiste Kingery, an alleged firearms trafficker U.S. officials allowed to operate for years without arresting despite significant evidence that he was supplying the cartels with massive amounts of grenade parts and ammunition.
Kingery's smuggling is not directly part of Fast and Furious. But, as Attkisson reports, the Kingery case was overseen by the same U.S. attorney in Arizona and ATF office in Phoenix that let suspects traffic thousands of weapons to drug cartels in the operation that resulted in the deaths of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and ICE agent Jaime Zapata.
The Fast and Furious pattern of failing to interdict the weapons flow or arrest those involved in a timely manner is once again apparent. In 2009, ATF learned that Kingery, already under suspicion for running AK-47s into Mexico, was also dealing in grenades.
"Documents show they (ATF) developed a secret plan to let him smuggle parts to Mexico in early 2010 and follow him to his factory. Some ATF agents vehemently objected, worried that Kingery would disappear once he crossed the border into Mexico. That's exactly what happened," Attkisson reports.
Kingery resurfaced in January 2010 and was again under ATF surveillance after he bought about 50 grenade "bodies" and headed to Mexico. Six months later, Kingery was caught leaving the U.S. for Mexico with 114 disassembled grenades in a tire.
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